Painter, relief maker, writer, broadcaster and teacher, Canney was born in Falmouth, where he was taken to art shows from an early age. In the early 1940s he studied at Redruth and Penzance Schools of Art and St Ives School of Painting, under Leonard Fuller. After army service he studied at Goldsmiths College of Art, 1947-51, and then undertook postgraduate study at Patrick Allan-Fraser School of Art, Hospitalfield, Arbroath. In 1956 he was appointed curator of Newlyn Orion Gallery, and began broadcasting on radio and television. In 1964-65 Canney taught at Plymouth College of Art and then in 1965-66 was appointed visiting gallery director and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1966 to 1983 he was on the staff of the West of England College of Art. In 1984 he moved to a village near Siena, Italy and continued to paint. In 1985 he scripted an award-winning documentary film for television on painting in Newlyn. He exhibited regularly at group exhibitions in Britain and abroad. His later one-man shows included Newlyn Art Gallery, 1983; Prescote Art and Design, Edinburgh, 1984; and Belgrave Gallery from 1990. Plymouth City Art Gallery and several other public collections hold his work.

Scott, Nicholson, Vaughan, Hilton and Lanyon were all friends of his. Canney was unusual amongst his contemporaries in so far as he was an indigenous Cornishman.

The 49 works in this show were produced by MichaelCanney in the last 25 years of his life. The pictures comefrom the artist’s estate and represent the most significantgroup of his work ever to come on to the market.Canney was an innovator, and discovered the possibilitiescreated by the invention of a new medium. Alkyd oilpaint was developed in the 1930s and 40s for industrialprocesses which required special paint finishes. Theaddition of alkyd resin to oil paint gives more flexibilitywhen dry and speeds up the drying process. This mediumwas to have a profound influence on Canney’s work in hislater years. It allowed him to paint with a precision which isimpossible with slow drying oils, laying contrasting tonesadjacent to each other with no bleeding of colours, and toproduce effects on the surface of the paint, with a variety oftechniques, almost immediately after the paint had beenlaid down. The result is a stronger and more permanentwork of art, less susceptible to damage as it dries and moredurable when the process is complete.Born in 1923 at Falmouth he was, from an early age,inculcated into the modern art movement in Britain, andin particular that of the West Country, where so manyleading artists of the 20th Century were based. From hisfirst experiences visiting exhibitions, his time serving in theforces in Italy, and on to his career as an artist he came intoclose contact with colleagues of the highest distinction andsome of the greatest creative minds of twentieth centuryart: Giorgio De Chirico was an early influence and encouragedCanney to pursue his enthusiasm for art. Agednineteen he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworthand was to collaborate with Hepworth on an open airexhibition at Penlee Park. He became friends with RogerHilton, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon. In 1958 he metMark Rothko who liked his work: they had a sharedadmiration for John Tunnard, whose work was then littleknown. Mixing in the artistic circles of the time he cameto know William Scott, Robert Adams, Kenneth Noland,Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Tobey, Naum Gabo andFrancis Bacon. These friendships and associations keptCanney involved with painters and painting. He lectured,wrote, made broadcasts and commented on the work ofartists of his own time, and always sought new breakthroughsin his own work.The earliest pictures in the show are from the 1970sand are painted in oil on canvas; they are, like all of hiswork from this time onward in the Constructivisttradition. The compositions are asymmetric, with clearblocks of colour, and the surfaces are smooth, evenpolished. In Composition with Red Angle (cat.12) theshapes are varied asymmetrical inventions, juxtaposed bythe artist, with differing colours to form an intriguing yetstable composition. Similarly the painting Composition inblack (cat.11) is a taut construction of interlocking formsmade stark by the heightened contrast of the palette. Inthese two pictures, as in the other nine oils in the exhibition,the language is simple, an arrangement of manysolitary colours to construct a composition on a singletone background. Canney’s inventiveness is clear and easyto appreciate and with great precision and painstakingtechnical ability he is working at the limit of his materials.In the late 1970s and early 80s Canney embarked ontwo new projects, the first of which he continued until the end of his working life. His paintings became concernedwith formal geometric shapes, in particular thesquare, and he experimented not just with compositionusing these shapes, but deconstructed them, cutting,folding, peeling, unravelling and dividing, sometimesusing numerical sequences such as Fibonacci, and oftenusing common fractions such as ⅓, ¼, ¹⁄₅ , which hemaintained were easily understood by the human eye.Between 1979 and 1983, to show his ideas to best effect,Canney used the second of his new projects, the whiterelief. The purpose of the minimalist, stark works was inhis own words: ‘to master the simple in order to proceed tothe complex. For example, the whiteness of the reliefs is not asearch for purity or even for a simplicity of statement. Whitepermits the element of relief to show most readily.’As he progressed further with his analysis of the squareand other shapes he was at the same time starting to use apaint type which would transform the variety and appearanceof his pictures. His discovery and experimentationwith alkyd allowed his vision and thoughts to come tofruition in a burst of creativity which lasts until he wasfinally forced to abandon painting due to ill health.Alkyd, or alkyd oil paint contains a resin which meansthat the medium dries quickly, or more accurately ‘sets’ orhardens. This happens in a matter of hours and allowsblocks of colour to be laid down adjacent to each otherwithout any danger of ‘run’ or mixing. The earliest datedworks by Canney using this medium are from 1981 andinclude System with Circles No. 1 (cat.30) which whileexploiting the technical advantages has not quite departedfrom the earlier compositions. But with Four Plus FourEquals Two (cat.19) we can see a new departure in theform of the composition. Canney first creates the compositionin a white relief, and then realises the same ideausing only four colour tones. From these earlyexperimentations the work quickly takes on a thirdelement, that of surface treatment, to produce scratchedareas (Rotation No. II, cat.8), rubbed areas (Construction,cat.39), incising (Three Triangles, cat.33), lifting of paint(Enveloping V, cat.6), and that of delivering pigment intothe grooves of paint already dried (Granite Village by theSea, cat.34). At this time he retired from lecturing on art,and he was invited to curate an exhibition of his recentwork at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance. In thecatalogue notes Canney has chosen to describe the mediumnot as oils but as painted in alkyd.With these new found possibilities, and his exceptionalfeel for colour, Canney started to create much morecomplex images, laying bands of colour over one another,he paints a third, fusing in his mind, and then on the panelthe ‘resultant’ patch of colour. Each of these sections hasbeen laid down independently, left to dry, and then theothers filled in. At the same time as he paints these vibrantcolourful pictures he also produces incised monotonepictures (Sgraffito 3, 4 & 5, cats.25–7), these beautiful worksecho his period of making white reliefs, where he ‘mastersthe simple to proceed to the complex’. In these compositionshe takes his meditations on the square to a deeperlevel of analysis, no longer preserving the surface area, heuses only the outline, and when these are folded onthemselves, and their corner angles are changed he revealsthe possibility of an infinite number of permutations,while arranging the shapes on a muted ground of delicatesgraffito paint.Michael Canney’s art developed throughout his life,but once he had adopted the Constructivist style hecontinued it. Experimenting with both composition andmedia, his work combines visual beauty and a love formaterials, with a sharp intellectual study of form, geometryand balance. His own very particular style developedalongside some of the major names of the modern movementin British art. This comprehensive show of Canney’swork provides the opportunity to enjoy, and reassess hisown contribution to 20th century British abstract art.